A recent study by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development concluded that biofuels “offer a cure [for oil dependence] that is worse than the disease.” A National Academy of Sciences study said corn-based ethanol could strain water supplies. The American Lung Association expressed concern about a form of air pollution from burning ethanol in gasoline. Political cartoonists have taken to skewering the fuel for raising the price of food to the world’s poor.
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A study coauthored by Nobel-prize-winning chemist Paul Crutzen said corn ethanol might exacerbate climate change as the added fertilizer used to grow corn raised emissions of a very potent greenhouse gas called nitrous oxide. The ethanol industry replies to that one with an Energy Department study concluding that use of ethanol reduces greenhouse-gas emissions by 18% to 28% on a per-gallon basis, provided that coal isn’t used to run ethanol plants.
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Mr. Dinneen, who has been lobbying on ethanol so long he’s known as the “reverend of renewable fuels,” says he’s “reasonably confident” Congress will raise the ethanol mandate. He says he’s talking with the military, labor groups, Southern black churches and others about how ethanol can help them. “We’ve got to build the biggest, baddest coalition we can.”

A retrovirus stores its genetic information in a single-stranded molecule of RNA, instead of the more common double-stranded DNA. When it infects a cell, the virus deploys a special enzyme, called reverse transcriptase, that enables it to copy itself and then paste its own genes into the new cell’s DNA. It then becomes part of that cell forever; when the cell divides, the virus goes with it. Scientists have long suspected that if a retrovirus happens to infect a human sperm cell or egg, which is rare, and if that embryo survives - which is rarer still - the retrovirus could take its place in the blueprint of our species, passed from mother to child, and from one generation to the next, much like a gene for eye color or asthma.

When the sequence of the human genome was fully mapped, in 2003, researchers also discovered something they had not anticipated: our bodies are littered with the shards of such retroviruses, fragments of the chemical code from which all genetic material is made. It takes less than two per cent of our genome to create all the proteins necessary for us to live. Eight per cent, however, is composed of broken and disabled retroviruses, which, millions of years ago, managed to embed themselves in the DNA of our ancestors. They are called endogenous retroviruses, because once they infect the DNA of a species they become part of that species. One by one, though, after molecular battles that raged for thousands of generations, they have been defeated by evolution. Like dinosaur bones, these viral fragments are fossils. Instead of having been buried in sand, they reside within each of us, carrying a record that goes back millions of years. Because they no longer seem to serve a purpose or cause harm, these remnants have often been referred to as “junk DNA.” Many still manage to generate proteins, but scientists have never found one that functions properly in humans or that could make us sick.

Promising technologies already exist that could be developed to deliver renewable energy cheaper than coal. We think the time is ripe to build rapidly on the tremendous work on renewable energy. For example, I believe that solar thermal technology provides a very plausible path to generating cheaper electricity. By combining talented technologists, great partners and large investments, we have an opportunity to quickly push this technology forward. Our goal is to build 1 gigawatt of renewable energy capacity that is cheaper than coal. We are optimistic that this can be done within years, not decades. If we succeed, it would likely provide a path to replacing a substantial portion of the world’s electricity needs with renewable energy sources.

To lead this effort, we’re looking for a world-class team. We need creative and motivated entrepreneurs and technologists with expertise in a broad range of areas, including materials science, physics, chemistry, mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, land acquisition and management, power transmission and substations, construction, and regulatory issues. Join us. And if you’re interested, read about our previous work toward a clean energy future

The new 256-slice CT machine takes large numbers of X-ray pictures, and combines them using computer technology to produce the final detailed images. It also generates images in a fraction of the time of other scanners: a full body scan takes less than a minute.
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Because the images are 3D they can be rotated and viewed from different directions - giving doctors the greatest possible help in looking for signs of abnormalities or disease.
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At present, it is only being used in one hospital: the Metro Health medical centre in Cleveland, Ohio, which has been using it for the past month.
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the first commercially viable CT scanner, which was invented by Sir Godfrey Newbold Hounsfield in Hayes, United Kingdom at the company’s laboratories and unveiled in 1972. At the same time, Allan McLeod Cormack of Tufts University independently invented a similar machine, and the two men shared the 1979 Nobel Prize in Medicine. “This is a quantum shift from the first CT scanners as it gives a lot more detail,” says Dr Keith Prowse, Chairman of the British Lung Foundation.

Scientists and public health professionals have been debating whether eradication is possible. Some have argued that resources should be directed at trying to contain the disease, which would be far less costly than trying to eliminate it entirely. That idea was dismissed at today’s announcement. “Eradicating polio is an achievable goal,” said William Gates Sr., co-chairman of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

Dr. Margaret Chan, director-general of the World Health Organization, said: “We have very few opportunities to improve the world in a permanent way. And this is one.” Polio has stricken untold millions around the world. In 1952, its peak year in the U.S., it paralyzed more than 20,000 Americans. But it became a disease of the past in this country after the discovery of a preventive vaccine in the 1950s and universal immunization.
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The Gates grant comes at a critical time for the global initiative, which faces a funding shortfall of $650 million, officials said. Most of the initial $100 million will be spent on mass immunization campaigns, poliovirus surveillance activities, and community education and outreach in polio-affected countries.

In recent years, importation of the disease from affected areas into countries where the disease had been eliminated has set back eradication efforts. But last month the World Health Organization released data indicating that the last four polio-endemic countries were within reach of wiping out the disease. The health authority said significant progress had been made in India and Nigeria, which together account for 85 percent of the world’s polio cases.

Most of the atmospheric gases are transparent to visible light. They don’t filter the Sun’s light and make it yellow, as a yellow filter would. Besides, if colored gases made the Sun appear yellow, where does the blue come from? The part of the atmosphere that changes the Sun’s light is the molecules and tiny particles that are floating in it.

There are particles of water–tiny droplets too small to be seen as clouds. There are particles of organic material–smog or haze, condensed from volatile organic chemicals that have gotten into the air. There are particles of sulfuric acid from volcanoes and power plants. There are molecules of gases in the atmosphere.

These tiny particles, much smaller than the wavelengths of sunlight, scatter the sunlight as photons from the Sun interact with the particles. This is called Rayleigh scattering after the British physicist who described how it works. (Larger particles, like the water droplets in clouds, are closer to the wavelengths of sunlight, and they scatter it differently. This is why clouds are not blue.)

CU-Boulder physics Professor Noel Clark said the team found that surprisingly short segments of DNA, life’s molecular carrier of genetic information, could assemble into several distinct liquid crystal phases that “self-orient” parallel to one another and stack into columns when placed in a water solution. Life is widely believed to have emerged as segments of DNA- or RNA-like molecules in a prebiotic “soup” solution of ancient organic molecules.
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Such DNA polynucleotides had previously been shown to organize into liquid crystal phases in which the chains spontaneously oriented parallel to each other, he said. Researchers understand the liquid crystal organization to be a result of DNA’s elongated molecular shape, making parallel alignment easier, much like spaghetti thrown in a box and shaken would be prone to line up in parallel, Clark said.

The CU-Boulder and University of Milan team began a series of experiments to see how short the DNA segments could be and still show liquid crystal ordering, said Clark. The team found that even a DNA segment as short as six bases, when paired with a complementary segment that together measured just two nanometers long and two nanometers in diameter, could still assemble itself into the liquid crystal phases, in spite of having almost no elongation in shape.

Structural analysis of the liquid crystal phases showed that they appeared because such short DNA duplex pairs were able to stick together “end-to-end,” forming rod-shaped aggregates that could then behave like much longer segments of DNA. The sticking was a result of small, oily patches found on the ends of the short DNA segments that help them adhere to each other in a reversible way — much like magnetic buttons — as they expelled water in between them, Clark said.
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“In essence, the liquid crystal phase condensation selects the appropriate molecular components, and with the right chemistry would evolve larger molecules tuned to stabilize the liquid crystal phase. If this is correct, the linear polymer shape of DNA itself is a vestige of formation by liquid crystal order.”

In a radio debate with Salzman on the NPR program “Science Friday,” Intel Corp. Chairman Craig Barrett blasted Salzman’s “backward-looking analysis.” Said Barrett: “The U.S. cannot be successful if we are only ‘average’ ” in math and science. “[S]aying we’re ‘OK’ because we’re average just can’t be right. That’s backward looking. That’s not looking ahead at competition with India, China, Russia and others that are putting heavy emphasis on education.”
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Salzman did, however, conceded one point to his critics, acknowledging that the engineering field in the U.S. isn’t what it used to be. As a profession, “engineering is not a field that has a bright future,” he said. Quoting an engineer interviewed for the Urban Institute study, Salzman said, “It was a great ride, but it’s over.”

Scientists from the Royal Tyrrell Museum and the Canadian Museum of Nature have [discovered]… Eotriceratops xerinsularis (pronounced EE-OH-try-sair-ah-tops ZEER-in-soo-lair-iss)… The dino may be an ancestor of the well-know triceratops, and at the very least, is the group’s earliest known member; researchers say the Eotriceratops lived in southern Alberta 68 million years ago.

It is the largest type of horned dinosaur ever discovered in Alberta, and possibly the world.

According to researchers, Eotriceratops likely reached eight or nine metres from nose to tail. It had a massive skull that featured a solid frill (this alone was three metres in length), and three horns - two above each eye, and another, shorter one, perched on its nose.
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Judging by its teeth, the Eotriceratops was a plant-eater, but one that would have been able to ward off predators.

Harmony and balance make you feel good. American Rubyists frequently take up all the points of Ruby’s power, expressiveness, and efficiency, but they don’t seem to register the point that Ruby was designed to make you feel good. Even Rubyists who want to explain why Ruby makes them feel good often fail to mention that it was expressly designed for that exact purpose.
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Don’t program in Ruby because you want power or efficiency. Don’t program in Ruby because you think you “should”, either. Program in Ruby because you like it. And if you don’t like it, don’t program in it.

Year by year, Yellowstone’s hot waters are yielding remarkable new microbial specimens with implications for medicine, agriculture and energy, as well as offering clues to the formation of earliest life on Earth and maybe even on Mars. The potential financial windfalls are enormous, as evidenced by one big jackpot.
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Yellowstone microbes (and those from a few other hot spots on the planet) may also hold great promise for bioremediation — cleaning up chemical pollution, oil slicks and smokestack emissions — as well as the means to accelerate biomass fermentation and develop drought-resistant crops. And there is more to be discovered: Probably less than one percent of Yellowstone’s microscopic life forms have been discovered and studied.
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the National Park Service signed a secretive research-sharing agreement with Diversa Corporation in 1998. Non-profit groups quickly cried “bio-piracy!” when they found out and sued the Service over the arrangement. While a federal court dismissed the case, it ordered the Park Service to address the issue… But the Park Service is still trying to come up with an acceptable, benefits-sharing agreement that might allow bio-prospecting of microbes and disclosure of findings, with a fair return to the Park from any commercial success.

While working on the conundrum, Higgs came up with an elegant mechanism to solve the problem. It showed that at the very beginning of the universe, the smallest building blocks of nature were truly weightless, but became heavy a fraction of a second later, when the fireball of the big bang cooled. His theory was a breakthrough in itself, but something more profound dropped out of his calculations.

Higgs’s theory showed that mass was produced by a new type of field that clings to particles wherever they are, dragging on them and making the heavy. Some particles find the field more sticky than others. Particles of light are oblivious to it. Others have to wade through it like an elephant in tar. So, in theory, particles can weigh nothing, but as soon as they are in the field, they get heavy.

Scientists now know that Higgs’s extraordinary field, or something very similar to it, played a key role in the formation of the universe. Without it, the cosmos would not have exploded into the rich, infinite galaxies we see today. The spinning disc of cosmic dust that collapsed 4.5 billion years ago to form our solar system would never have been. No planets would have formed, nor a sun to warm them. Life would not have stood a chance.

In late summer 1964, two years before he would give his Princeton lecture, Higgs rushed out a succinct letter, packed with mathematical formulae that backed his discovery and sent it to a leading physics journal run from Cern, the European nuclear research organisation in Geneva. The paper was published almost immediately, but went largely unnoticed.

The Pollution Magnet - Eighty-two thousand people die from cancer in Bangladesh every year, many due to arsenic poisoning. But building upon her discovery of a way to get rust nanoparticles to bind to arsenic, Vicki Colvin has invented a new, astonishingly easy way to clean the water supply: Sauté a teaspoon of rust in a mixture of oil and lye, which breaks down the rust into nano-sized pieces. Retrieve the rust particles with a household magnet. Then immerse the rust-covered magnet into a pot of contaminated water. Pull out the arsenic. The system is up to a hundred times more efficient than existing methods, and requires no electricity or manufacturing infrastructure, so even the poorest of villagers can use it.

Depending upon government regulations, Colvin’s extraction system should go global in as few as five years. Yet ultimately, Colvin, a professor of chemistry and chemical and biomolecular engineering at Rice University, has bigger plans. She sees her method as just the first step toward developing an easy point-of-use water-purification system that would cover virtually every pollutant. The filter would have a dipstick to tell you what’s in the water and a reader to tell you what you need to add to pull it out — perhaps silver nanoparticles to kill bacteria or a protein to capture pesticides.

For centuries, the natives of northern India and many parts of Africa have known of the many benefits of Moringa oleifera. Its uses are as unique as the names it is known by, such as clarifier tree, horseradish tree and drumstick tree (referring to the large drumstick shaped pods) and in East Africa it is called “mother’s best friend”. Virtually every part of the tree can be used. Native only to the foothills of the Himalayas, it is now widely cultivated in Africa, Central and South America, Sri Lanka, India, Malaysia and the Philippines. This tree, though little known in the Western world, is nutritional dynamite. There are literally hundreds of uses for this tree.

The immature pods are the most valued and widely used of all the tree parts. The pods are extremely nutritious, containing all the essential amino acids along with many vitamins and other nutrients. The immature pod can be eaten raw or prepared like green peas or green beans, while the mature pods are usually fried and possess a peanut-like flavor. The pods also yield 38 - 40% of non-drying, edible oil known as Ben Oil. This oil is clear, sweet and odorless, and never becomes rancid. Overall, its nutritional value most closely resembles olive oil. The thickened root is used as a substitute for horseradish although this is now discouraged as it contains alkaloids, especially moriginine, and a bacteriocide, spirochin, both of which can prove fatal following ingestion. The leaves are eaten as greens, in salads, in vegetable curries, as pickles and for seasoning. They can be pounded up and used for scrubbing utensils and for cleaning walls. Leaves and young branches are relished by livestock. The Bark can be used for tanning and also yields a coarse fiber. The flowers, which must be cooked, are eaten either mixed with other foods or fried in batter and have been shown to be rich in potassium and calcium.

Nigersaurus taqueti shows extreme adaptations for a dinosaurian herbivore including a skull of extremely light construction, tooth batteries located at the distal end of the jaws, tooth replacement as fast as one per month, an expanded muzzle that faces directly toward the ground, and hollow presacral vertebral centra with more air sac space than bone by volume. A cranial endocast provides the first reasonably complete view of a sauropod brain including its small olfactory bulbs and cerebrum. Skeletal and dental evidence suggests that Nigersaurus was a ground-level herbivore that gathered and sliced relatively soft vegetation, the culmination of a low-browsing feeding strategy first established among diplodocoids during the Jurassic.